A Life, Lived

Photo Hunt - Lightning

This week's Photo Hunt theme is 'lightning'.

I apologize in advance for this crappy shot. I was out walking in Toronto a number of years ago and just managed to have my cell phone out at the right time to capture this lightning hitting the CN Tower.

Adele

Friday was a bad day. I was supposed to take the day off as a vacation day but that was cancelled when I meeting came up that I could not ignore. I will nor lie - I was feeling sorry for myself.

Things took a turn when our Xerox rep called - they had two tickets in their box for that night's Adele concert. Was I interested?

Was i????

It was last minute - there was no way Paul could leave work and come into the city. I was tempted to say no but my colleague convinced me to say 'yes'!

It was one of those impromptu things which becomes the perfect thing you need.

My friend Nancy was free making it a happy date.

We headed to the Air Canada centre and made our way to the box. We were the first to arrive but that allowed us to get the best seats, start in on the drinks, and get the lay of the land.

In the end there were about 15 people in the box, most of their Soebys employees (I guess they have a big contract with Xerox). We drank, ate, and listened to a great show.

All in all the perfect finish to a rather hellish week . . .

 

Lawren Harris and Frank

Last night Mom and Paul met me in the city after work and we went to the Art Gallery of Ontario. This weekend is the last weekend of the Lawren Harris exhibit and we were determined to see it.

Harris is one of my favourite artists. Famous for monumental pictures of smooth-sheen shorelines and mountains, often bathed in beatific light. One of the things the exhibit showed was the artist's talent for building heavy counterweights to those spiritual landscapes with deep, uncomfortable context all around them.

It starts with Harris’s earliest pictures of Toronto, a teeming brew of industry and people that coalesce in its gritty, hardscrabble streets. The Eaton’s manufacturing plant looms above the Ward, a tight warren of immigrant worker’s cottages where Nathan Phillips Square now sits, cloaked in a smoky shroud. A gas plant belches steam over the dun-grey snow of the city’s filthy core. A weathered two-storey shack perches on a desolate street, its plaster hide crumbling into the muck below, the sky the colour of ash.

You can see in the contours of the snow above the evolving style the later evolved in the looming pictures of the north, a place Harris only visited once yet it formed the basis for his most renowned period of art.

After feeding our souls we went to the gallery restaurant, Frank, for another type of feed. Mom was pokey in the gallery so Paul and I were there a bit early - perfect for enjoying a pre-dinner cocktail.

I ordered a Ginger and Lemongrass Daiquiri.

Paul ordered an Old Fashioned made with the Canadian Whiskey - Great Northern, that has taken the world by storm. He doesn't normally order 'straight up' cocktails so the booze hit him like a brick and loopy Paul soon joined the table.

The soup of the day was watermelon gazpacho.

My main was the chicken and biscuit - sweet corn pudding, summer squash succotash, smoked sage biscuit, bee pollen dust, honey mustard. MMMMMM Pure comfort food.

Mom and Paul both ordered dessert - I stayed out of the pool to some extent with coffee and a biscotti.

 

After dinner we had a bit of an adventure getting the car out of a parking garage when all of the entrances were locked. SIGH Once we figured that out we zipped home and to bed. It was an awesome finish to a crazy week but a good reminder that there is more in life than work.

Working Hard or Hardly Working?

Happy Sunday!

This is my view this morning . . .

I'll be here for the next 5 days. Our Provincial Executive meets all day today (yes, on a Sunday) and the ETFO Annual Meeting runs from Monday until Thursday.

While I have been to 20 Annual Meetings of the union over the years but this will be my first in this new role. I confess that I am a bit nervous. I used to just show up, listen do my assigned tasks, and leave. Now there is a level of responsibility that I have not experienced before. Instead of hiding at the back with my colleagues I will be sitting up at the main table where people will be watching what I am doing and searching my facial expression. This is going to be a challenge for ADHD non poker player expression Jerry.

:-)

Melting

I know it is typical to have periods of hot weather in the summer. I also know it is customary to whine about it. It has been so hot here that the soles of running shoes are melting. The Toronto area has been the hottest spot in Canada for three days running. I do not care for that level of hot. The weather has been exasperated by the fact we desperately need rain.

SIGH

This is sorta of how I feel . . .

Chihuly at the ROM

Last week Paul, mom, and I went to the Chihuly exhibit at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum. We've seen his work before and were excited to see this exhibit featuring almost 20 separate installations.

For anyone who hasn’t seen them Chihuly makes sculptures of glass, in incredibly bright, vivid colours. In fact, his work almost seems like an explosion of shapes and colours.

Some of the reviews were rather snooty - frowning on the exhibit of glass sculptures being housed in Canada's most respected and revered museum. Others suggesting that glass making is a craft not an art and therefore not worthy of display. A few reviewers have criticized the work because of the 'studio approach' used by Chihuly (apparently forgetting that all of the great artists of the renaissance utilized a similar approach).

At the end of the day, the collection is a beautiful explosion of bright, vivid installations. I was struck by the reaction of the people in attendance - pure amazement.

Chihuly will be on display at the ROM through Jan. 2, 2017.

Photo Hunt - Market

This week's Photo Hunt theme is 'market'.

These shots of from Toronto's St Lawrence market.

This week's Photo Hunt theme is 'market'.

These shots of from Toronto's St Lawrence market.

Travel Tuesdays - the Toronto Sign

This image will be well represented in thousands of photo collections this year. Toronto placed this sign in front of the reflecting pond by city hall for the PanAm Games. As can sometimes happen this sign, meant as a temporary installation, took on a life of its own. Expect to see this around for some time . . .

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now's the Time

On Friday as I was stuck in traffic coming home from the office I sent Paul a message saying 'plan something for tomorrow that gets us out of the house'. As we close in on a record of the most consecutive days below 0 it is safe to say that the winter has taken a toll on me. I've been cocooning  . . . and I needed to pull myself out from that stupor. When I finally made it home he suggested visiting the Art Gallery of Ontario. I thought it sounded like a great plan so off we went yesterday to see the Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now's the Time exhibit and wander about the city.

The title of the exhibition derives, in part, from both a blues tune of the same name that Charlie Parker wrote and recorded with Miles Davis (another Basquiat hero) in 1945 – you’ll hear it as you enter the show – and a 1985 Basquiat creation, a big black hunk of plywood shaped like a vinyl recording (you’ll see it upon crossing the exhibition threshold). “Now’s the time” is also the motif/incantation Martin Luther King used to great effect in his famous “I have a dream” speech from 1963, an excerpt of which the AGO is playing ad infinitum at the show’s mid-point.

Of course, the title isn’t just a historical reference; it’s also an argument of sorts for Basquiat’s relevance in the right here/right now of Ferguson, Staten Island and Phoenix, Cleveland, Sanford and … Toronto. Much of Basquiat's art deals with the issue of black identity and recent events serve to further illuminate the themes.

If he were alive today, Jean-Michel Basquiat would be 54 years old: an artist comfortably in mid-career, maybe forgotten, maybe looking forward to a retrospective or two. Would his star have faded? Would he have moved on from his early style, or would he still be making the hotheaded, volatile paintings and drawings he ground out so quickly in the 1980s? Who can say? Basquiat stormed the New York art world in 1981, but in 1988, with more than 1,000 paintings behind him, he overdosed. He will never be more than 27.

There is a theme running through the exhibit of 'the artist as a commodity to be bought and sold'. Basquiat was no innocent outsider corrupted by the art world. On the contrary, he was an intensely ambitious middle-class boy (the family owned a brownstone in Brooklyn’s chichi Boerum Hill; his father drove a Mercedes) who knew his art history – and was especially sensitive to the complex absence/presence of blackness in western art.

The artwork, some of which is created on items Basquiat culled from New York’s streets – from wood to cloth to canvas, and foam – in its own way takes the notion of “the medium is the message” to another level. The artist entwines language, history and images of “heroes and saints,” friends, athletes, and even livestock with language and selective self-censorship as a means of crafting his narrative.

I confess that I am not very educated when it comes to modern art. Nonetheless, I was stunned by how bold his art is. Most of his pieces contained more than one kind of material mixing poetry, paint, drawings, comic book pages, text and found objects.

Standing in front of some of his larger pieces, you really starts to get a sense of how much work, effort and thought would have gone into these. Every paint stroke or drop of paint, every word, every image, and every scribble has a purpose, and when put together creates a statement much bigger than you or me, statements that still exhibit truth today.

You get a 2-4-1 deal with this exhibition – view the art and receive a mini-art lesson.

I recommend basking in Basquiat’s work while listening to the audio tour. The audio tour features commentary and analysis from significant Canadian and international artists, historians, and critics, all of whom share their perspectives on Basquiat’s approach and confrontation of social issues that existed in his time, which either still exist, have evolved, or are resolved in our time.

Basquiat’s surviving family members also give an insight into his childhood and his early inspirations, making this exhibition retrospective in more ways than one.

Note: The AGO offers a free app and audio tour, or you can pay $3-4 for the traditional headset.

Now’s The Time is an excellent exhibition, one that frankly, took us by surprise.

See the exhibition before it winds up in May 2015.

Photo Hunt - Smooth

This week's Photo Hunt theme is 'smooth'.

These photos were taken at Toronto's wonderful new Aga Khan Museum. The museum is set among 5 large reflecting ponds. The surface of the water of smooth and calm. I loved the way the buildings, flags flapping in the winds, and natural features were reflected in the smooth surface of the waters . . .